The Golden Notebook is the story of writer Anna Wulf, the four notebooks in which she keeps the record of her life, and her attempt to tie them all together in a fifth, gold-colored notebook. The book intersperses segments of an ostensibly realistic narrative of the lives of Molly and Anna, and their children, ex-husbands and lovers—entitled Free Women—with excerpts from Anna’s four notebooks, coloured black (of Anna’s experience in Southern Rhodesia, before and during WWII, which inspired her own bestselling novel), red (of her experience as a member of the Communist Party), yellow (an ongoing novel that is being written based on the painful ending of Anna’s own love affair), and blue (Anna’s personal journal where she records her memories, dreams, and emotional life). Each notebook is returned to four times, interspersed with episodes from Free Women, creating non-chronological, overlapping sections that interact with one another. This post-modernistic styling, with its space and room for “play” engaging the characters and readers, is among the most famous features of the book, although Lessing insisted that readers and reviewers pay attention to the serious themes in the novel.

The Four-Gated City is set in Post-War Britain. Martha is in London as the 1950s begin. She is integrally part of the social history of the time – the Cold War, the Aldermaston Marches, Swinging London, the deepening of poverty and social anarchy. The volume ends with the century in the grip of World War Three. In the year 1997, Martha dies on a contaminated island off the northwest coast of Scotland. Most of the people of Britain have died before her, in 1978, of multiple afflictions: bubonic plague, nerve gases, nuclear explosions.

The Dancers at the End of Time is a series of science fiction novels and short stories written by Michael Moorcock, the setting of which is the End of Time, an era “where entropy is king and the universe has begun collapsing upon itself”. The inhabitants of this era are immortal decadents, who create flights of fancy using power rings which draw on energy devised and stored by their ancestors millions of years prior. Time travel is possible, and throughout the series various points in time are visited and revisited. Space travelers are also common, but most residents of the End of Time find leaving the planet distasteful and clichéd. The title of the series is itself taken from a poem by a fictitious 19th Century poet, Ernest Wheldrake, which Mrs. Amelia Underwood quotes in The End of All Songs. “Ernest Wheldrake” had been a pseudonym used by Algernon Charles Swinburne. The original trilogy (An Alien Heat, The Hollow Lands, and The End of All Songs) was published between 1974 and 1976. The trilogy purports to tell the last love story in human history. Other stories in this sequence include The Transformation of Miss Mavis Ming (also known as A Messiah at the End of Time) which is a rewrite of the novella Constant Fire. Several short stories, some of which were included in the collection Legends from the End of Time, were published in New Worlds 7-10 (the paperback revival of the magazine). Short stories featuring Elric (“Elric at the End of Time”), and Jerry Cornelius (“The Murderer’s Song”) also feature characters and places from the End of Time. Main characters in the series include Jherek Carnelian, one of the few humans at the End of Time to have been born naturally, rather than created; Mrs Amelia Underwood, a time traveler from the late 19th century; the enigmatic Lord Jagged; and Miss Mavis Ming in the eponymous The Transformation of Miss Mavis Ming, which also features the Fireclown. (The 1993 Millennium omnibus edition of Legends from the End of Time ostensibly assembles all the stories and The Transformation of Miss Mavis Ming – under the title Constant Fire – but was affected by severe printing errors and omits the final six lines of Elric at the End of Time and all but the final chapter of Constant Fire. These were corrected for the 1997 Orion edition.)

Legends from the End of Time: Pale Roses begins with the destruction of the rainbow part of Werther de Goethe’s creation Rain by the Everlasting Concubine, Mistress Christia, and Werther’s despair. After a short interlude, Werther discovers, by the use of a parachute that closely resembles a Hot air balloon, a child (Catherine Lily Marguerite Natasha Dolores Beatrice Machineshop-Seven Flambeau Gratitude) who is the fourteen year old daughter of two time travelers, and deigns to take on the role of her now deceased parents. Following a masquerade with the theme of Childhood, Werther is passionately overcome and engages in sexual intercourse with Catherine. After the event, disgusted by what he perceives to be the enormity of his acts, he is even more disgusted in Catherine for having enjoyed what she describes as le petit mal. The story climaxes with Werther’s suicide by jumping from his tower unaided by his parachute and his subsequent resurrection. It is then revealed that Catherine is really Mistress Christia in disguise, the series of events being an attempt to reconcile after her having destroyed his rainbow. White Stars: after discovering that he had inadvertently destroyed one of Lord Shark the Unknown’s experiments with lichen, the Duke of Queens offers to duel with him in order to rid himself of his guilt. In Ancient Shadows, a time traveler, Dafnish Armatuce, and her son, Snuffles, arrive at the End of Time, and become involved with Miss Mavis Ming.

Arthur William Upfield (1 September 1890 – 13 February 1964) was an Australian writer, best known for his works of detective fiction featuring Detective Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte (‘Bony’) of the Queensland Police Force, a half-caste Aborigine. Born in England, Upfield moved to Australia in 1910 and fought with the Australian military during the First World War. Following his war service, he travelled extensively throughout Australia, obtaining a knowledge of Australian Aboriginal culture that would later be used extensively in his written works. In addition to his detective fiction, Upfield was also a member of the Australian Geological Society and was involved in numerous scientific expeditions. Upfield’s works remained popular after his death, and in the 1970s were the basis for an Australian television series entitled “Boney”.

The Wind from Nowhere, first published in 1961 is the debut novel by English author J.G. Ballard. Prior to this, his published work had consisted solely of short stories. The novel was the first of a series of Ballard novels dealing with scenarios of ‘natural disaster’, in this case seeing civilization reduced to ruins by prolonged worldwide hurricane force winds. As an added dimension Ballard explores the ways in which disaster and tragedy can bond people together in ways that no normal experiences ever could. This, too, is a recurring theme in his works, making one of its first appearances here. Written in ten days, Ballard later dismissed this novel as a “piece of hackwork”, referring instead to The Drowned World as his first novel.

Vermilion Sands is a short-story collection by J. G. Ballard, first published in 1971. All the stories are set in an imaginary vacation resort called Vermilion Sands which suggests, among other places, Palm Springs in southern California. The characters are generally the wealthy and disaffected, or people who make a living off them, and parasites of various kinds. In the preface, Ballard himself wrote: “Vermilion Sands has more than its full share of dreams and illusions, fears and fantasies, but the frame for them is less confining. I like to think, too, that it celebrates the neglected virtues of the glossy, lurid and bizarre.”

In March 1912, in the event some people called the “Miracle,” Europe and parts of Asia and Africa, including its inhabitants, disappear suddenly overnight and are replaced with a slice of an alien Earth, a land mass of roughly equal outlines and terrain features, but with a strange new flora and fauna which seems to have followed a different path in evolution. Seen by some as an act of divine retribution, the “Miracle” affects the lives of people all around and transforms world history. The book describes the life and the adventures of Guilford Law, a young American photographer. As a 14-year-old boy, Guilford Law witnessed the “Miracle” as shimmering lights moving eerily across the ocean sky. As a grown man, he is determined to travel to the strange continent of Darwinia and explore its mysteries. To that end, he enlists as a photographer in the Finch expedition, which plans to travel up the river that used to be known as the Rhine and penetrate the bizarre new continent’s hidden depths as far as possible. He lands in the middle of the jungle in the midst of nationalistic skirmishes, in which partisans attack and wipe out most of the party of the Finch expedition on the continent that they believe to belong to them.

Floating Worlds (1975) – Anarchist Paula Mendoza climbs from unemployed obscurity to become a diplomat trying to keep the peace (with startling and unconventional methods) between Earth, the Mars colonists, and the mutant Styths from the outer planets of the solar system. This novel is notable for its sexual content, its feminist theme, and its literary quality—all comparable to the mid-70s work of Joanna Russ and Ursula K. Le Guin.

The opening of this play is “This is a simple-minded play about men who enjoy killing, and those who don’t.” Big game hunter and war hero Harold Ryan returns home to America, after having been presumed dead for several years. During the war he killed over 200 men and women, and countless more animals — for sport. He was in the Amazon Rainforest hunting for diamonds with Colonel Looseleaf Harper, a slow-witted aviation hero who had the unhappy task of dropping the atomic bomb on Nagasaki. Harold finds that his wife Penelope has developed relationships with men very much unlike himself, including a vacuum salesman called Shuttle and a hippie doctor called Dr. Woodly, who later becomes Harold’s foe. Harold also finds that his son, Paul, has been pampered and grown unmanly. Harold Ryan, the prolific killing machine, is very unsatisfied. It is set during 1960s America, and Harold feels the country has become weak, all the heroes have been replaced by intolerable pacifists, and that in post-war America there is no proper enemy for him to vanquish. This is the story of his tragic attempt to find one.

The “Wanda June” of the title is a young girl who died before she could celebrate her birthday. She was run over by an ice cream truck, but she is very pleased with her situation in Heaven, and feels that dying is a good thing and everyone in Heaven loves the person who sent them there. Her birthday cake was subsequently purchased by one of Penelope’s lovers, for a celebration of Harold’s birthday in his absence. Wanda June and several other deceased connections to Harold Ryan (including his ex-wife Mildred who drank herself to death because she couldn’t stand Harold’s premature ejaculation, and Major Von Koningswald, The Beast of Yugoslavia, Harold Ryan’s most infamous victim) speak to the audience from Heaven, where Jesus Christ, Adolf Hitler, Albert Einstein, and Judas Iscariot are happily playing shuffleboard.

In 1974, Venus on the Half-Shell, a book by Philip José Farmer in a style similar to that of Vonnegut and attributed to Kilgore Trout, was published. This caused some confusion among readers, as for some time many assumed that Vonnegut wrote it; when the truth of its authorship came out, Vonnegut was reported as being “not amused”. In an issue of the semi-prozine The Alien Critic/Science Fiction Review, published by Richard E. Geis, Farmer claimed to have received an angry, obscenity-laden telephone call from Vonnegut about it.

The Drifters is a novel by Pulitzer Prize-winning author James Michener, published in 1971 by Random House. The novel follows six young characters from diverse backgrounds and various countries as their paths meet and they travel together through parts of Spain, Portugal, Morocco and Mozambique. The story is told from the perspective of the narrator, George Fairbanks, who is an investment analyst for the fictional company World Mutual Bank in Switzerland. Mr. Fairbanks is connected with nearly every character in some way, and they all seem to open up to him throughout the novel in one way or another.

Space is a novel by James A. Michener published in 1982. It is a fictionalized history of the United States space program, with a particular emphasis on manned spaceflight. Michener writes in a semi-documentary style. The topics explored in the novel include naval warfare in the Pacific, air combat in the Korean War (something Michener had already explored in The Bridges at Toko-Ri), test pilot life at ‘Pax River’, astronaut selection and training, the role of the media in promoting the space program as a national achievement, and the development of the Gemini and Apollo spacecraft, the rise of the military-industrial complex and the evolution of NACA into NASA.

A professor of the classics, with background in classical languages, comparative literature, anthropology, history, and commercial art, Carson blends ideas and themes from many fields in her writing. She frequently references, modernizes, and translates Ancient Greek literature. She has published fifteen books as of 2010, all of which blend the forms of poetry, essay, prose, criticism, translation, dramatic dialogue, fiction, and non-fiction.